CHAPTER IX.
SOME LETTERS.
From Lewis Somerville to Douglas Carter.
Greendale, Va., May —, 19—.
Dear Douglas:
Bill and I are coming on finely. Already the noble palace is rearing its head. We’ve got the posts planted and the uprights and rafters in place and will begin on the roof to-morrow. Bill is a perfect glutton for work. Speaking of gluttons—we’ve got a cook. A perfect gem of a cook who has been born and bred at Lonesomehurst and doesn’t mind the country. We are going to hang on to her like grim Death to a dead nigger.
The funny thing about her is she is a real lady. I spotted it from the beginning from a certain way she had with her. She is only fourteen and her father, who, by the way, was the Englishman who built this cabin and used to own the side of the mountain, has been dead five years; but before he died this child evidently learned to eat with a fork and to take a daily bath and to keep her hair smooth. She handles the King’s English with the same respect and grace she does a fork, and her speech is very marked because of the contrast between it and the we uns and you uns and you allses of the ordinary mountaineer. She has lived ever since her father’s death with Aunt Mandy, a regular old mountain character who looks as though she might have stepped out of one of John Fox’s books. She is the same back and front, concave both ways—slightly more convex in the back than the front. She stands a good six feet in her stocking feet (although I doubt her ever having on a pair). I have never seen her without a snuff stick in her mouth except once and then she had a corn-cob pipe. She is as sharp as a tack and woe be to the one who engages her in a contest of wit.
Josh is her son and Josephus her mule. Mr. Mandy is dead, and Aunt Mandy and Josh, who is twelve, I think, have scratched a living out of their “clarin’” with the help of Josephus, who is as much of a character as Aunt Mandy and Josh.
When the Englishman died, Aunt Mandy took the little orphan Gwendolin to her house, never dreaming that there was anything for her to do but take her. She has been as good as gold to the girl and shared her corn pone and drippings with a heart of charity. Gwen is surely making up to her now for all her kindness as she does all the housework for her foster mother and all kinds of sewing and knitting, which she sells to the summer boarders down at the hotel at Greendale. I am crazy to engage Gwen and Josh for you girls but am afraid of butting in on your arrangements.